Before you begin

This template is aimed at people who want to knit their R Markdown documents to both HTML and PDF with as few surprises as possible. As the name suggests, I predominantly use it for my lecture notes. But I find that it works well for writing papers too.

See the package README for a longer description, as well as potential gotchas and limitations (e.g. font support for different LaTeX engines).

Template features

Here are some examples of features not available in vanilla R Markdown and how to use them.

Multi-column environments

Multi-column environments are supported via’s Pandoc’s fenced_divs syntax and some preamble sugar (bundled together with the template). For example, a two-column section would look like this.

Here is some example dplyr code.

library(dplyr)

mtcars %>% 
  group_by(am) %>% 
  summarise(mean(mpg))    
## `summarise()` ungrouping output (override with `.groups` argument)
## # A tibble: 2 x 2
##      am `mean(mpg)`
##   <dbl>       <dbl>
## 1     0        17.1
## 2     1        24.4

 

And the data.table equivalent.

library(data.table)
## 
## Attaching package: 'data.table'
## The following objects are masked from 'package:dplyr':
## 
##     between, first, last
## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
## 
##     transpose
mtcars_dt = as.data.table(mtcars)
mtcars_dt[, mean(mpg), by = am]   
##    am       V1
## 1:  1 24.39231
## 2:  0 17.14737

 

The same idea can be extended to additional columns and the individual column widths are also adjustable.

PDF support for non-standard fonts

This is an easy one; simply a matter of adding dev: cairo_pdf to the YAML. But it’s nice not having to remember that every time, no?

Note: As the figure caption suggests, to run this next chunk you’ll need to add Arial Narrow to your font book if it’s not installed on your system already.

library(ggplot2)
library(hrbrthemes)

ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(x="Fuel efficiency (mpg)", y="Weight (tons)",
       title="This plot uses Arial Narrow fonts",
       caption="Note: Fonts must be installed separately on your system.") + 
  theme_ipsum()

Ignore interactive content when exporting to PDF

In general, this template tries to do a good job of automatically handling (i.e. ignoring) interactive content when exporting to PDF. A notable exception is with embedded interactive content like external GIFs. In this case, rather than typing the usual, say, ![](mind-blown.gif) directly in the Rmd file, you should include the figure with knitr::include_graphics in an R chunk. This will allow you to control whether it renders, conditional on output format. For example, the following chunk will render an actual GIF when the knit target is HTML format, versus a message when that target is PDF format.